WTN: 1995 Chateau Grand Mayne

In reading a number of neuropsychology books over the last few weekends, I have found explanations for intuitions I have had about the reaches of my atavistic brain, which recognizes concerns of my distant ancestors, such as frogs in a swamp. The brain didn’t reinvent itself in its evolution from one-celled organisms and beyond, it built a patchwork over intact antique networks which overpowered their direct influences, except when a bloke decides to do the kind of thing which puts him in jail for 45 years.

The midbrain, for example, hasn’t much utility in Manhattan, but it still connects our eyes with the mechanism which sends out the long tongue toward a tasty aphid. The large cerebral cortex patched over it now has thoroughfares to the eyes which prevent our vision from taking the back roads. Nevertheless, when a person is blind because of an accidental insult, tumor or congenital problem in the visual cortex, and an experimenter asks that person to point to something, and he says he can’t because he can’t see it, but the experimenter instructs him to guess, anyway, he will point to the object a high percentage of the time – up to 99% of the time. It’s because he can see it using his midbrain, but can’t realize he is seeing it because his left thinking and talking cortex was patched on with no connection to the old brain.

I know that parts of my unthinking, artistic right brain and my midbrain and even my atavistic gut brain (which has recently been identified) relate to great Bordeaux wine in a way that expresses their affinity and appreciation numinously. I can’t prove it on paper, but I know it. Such workings explain how a connoisseur can be reduced to tears by a sip 1947 Cheval Blanc and why I adore AKB48.

Last night I had such an experience, not reduced to tears, but very numiniously affected by a modest 1995 Chateau Grand Mayne. To talk about it in terms of its magnificent cork and complex bouquet; blackberry (I think) fruit; cedar; sweet, high glycerin content; classic acidity and very classy long, long finish would diminish my communion with the marvelous bottle.

Even at my advanced age, I am still trying to make a bolus of several million additional dollars in an unlikely deal so that I can dine at such restaurants as Daniel and order 1947 Cheval Blanc, if they have it, or similar majestics at my pleasure, to see if they could possibly be better than that little Grand Mayne. It is hard to believe that they could be much better, but then when I drank Inglenook Cabernet Sauvignon from my one-bedroom San Francisco apartment kitchen table in 1969, I said the same thing, of which my wife reminds me.